Comments on: C# Gripe: enum base types

By: Nikki

Nikki — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:17:07 +0000

C# isn’t a valid value for the attribute “lang”.

By: DrPizza

DrPizza — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:49:04 +0000

"even though the type of the enum is int"No, it isn’t. The type of an enum is whatever the type you’ve specified; in this case the type is "Fields". That it has a *representation* that uses integers is for the most part an irrelevant implementation detail.This is done much better in Java 5, as it happens; Java 5 finally has proper enumerated values, and there they don’t even pretend to have any representation. But they’re also fully-fledged classes, so you can have members and methods and the like. They’re powerful and really rather good.C# unfortuanately goes with C-style enums, albeit with the "bonus" feature that you can specify some aspects of the representation; specifically the width of the integer and the integral value. This is a mistake. C# enums should function as Java enums.

By: Anders Widebrant

Anders Widebrant — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:35:46 +0000

I think it’s somewhat fair to require the cast, if one accepts the philosophy that the purpose of enums is to create a distinct type with a number of named values. According to this philosophy, it would be more legitimate to complain that AddAttribute uses a raw int argument rather than defining a proper descriptive enum type. The solution for naming integer arguments would then look something like this:

public class Fields
{
static const int Keyword = 0;
static const int enum2 = 1;
// …
}